Dir. Asif Kapadeia
Writ. Adam Sussman
Act. Sarah Michelle Geller, Sam Shepard

I don't know who decides how to cut a trailer for a movie, the director, producer, or whoever, but they should be shot. The trailer for this movie made seem to be a borderline rip off of The Grudge, but instead it is actually a mediocre murder mystery that uses cheap shock value to get scares. The director and producers should have made the movie more of a murder mystery and it would have been better; as it is the only reason to watch this movie is for my beloved Sarah Michelle Geller.

Joanna, played by ultra, ultra beautiful Sarah Michelle Geller (The Grudge,) is a twenty something sales woman who is having re-occurring nightmares about a town she has never been in and by a man she was stalked by as a little girl. In her sales travels, Joanna decides to go to the small Texas town to investigate her nightmares. Unfortunately for her, the longer she stays in town the nightmares intensify as she tries to figure out what they are about.

The biggest problem of this movie, like I said, was that the trailer makes it look like a thriller/horror movie and that simply is just not true. Some of the scenes in the trailer that made the movie look like a thriller were cut from the movie, the most notable being the scene where the hand comes through the mirror and grabs Joanna's. The producers really screwed up by selling the movie like this because the audience that would have paid money to see a movie like that would have been very disappointed and left telling everybody that the movie sucked. Those people who would have enjoyed the movie, don't really know who that would be, mystery lovers maybe, may not of gone to the movie because it looked like a horror type movie. Just piss poor planning by the producers, whose names by the way are Aaron Ryder and Jeffrey Silver.

As much as I love SMG, she needs to get away from the horror/thriller movies. Granted she has made a ton of money on them, but she can't continue to make these kinds of movies and have a long career. The only actress that I can think of that at one point had the title of "Scream Queen" that went on to have a good career was Jaime Lee Curtis. I notice that she does have the romantic comedy "The Girls Guide…" with Alec Baldwin coming out next year (which by the way makes my stomach churn at the prospect of her kissing geezer Baldwin, I mean he's 100 and he has been f*cking Kim Basinger, yuck,) so maybe she can start doing more of these types of movies. I will say that she tried to bring this movie up by acting her heart out. Geezer Sam Shepard (The Notebook) had the look like he already had cashed his check in the first scene.

The story was fairly interesting, even though fairly predictable. I did like the twist at the end even though I wasn't too surprised by it. The story kept me interested enough in the movie even though you couldn't tell who the bad guy was really until the end. The writer, Adam Sussman, should have decided which way to go with the film, and if he couldn't the director should have steered it in the right direction.

Maybe it's my complete blindness in my loyalty to SMG, but this movie wasn't horrible. It could have and should have been better, but in terms of movies that have been released this year, it was not the worst one out there.

Brian - the Naked Gun